For the LOVE of reading.

Last night I was sitting on the quiet side of the dance studio where my daughter gracefully dances and I was reading a book. I'd brought two books with me; The Light between oceans by M.L. Stedman and Donalyn Miller's book The Book Whisperer. I've been trying to read Miller's book for the last two years as I've had many people recommend it to me. I've even had one friend tell me that the book sounds just like me! With that said and after only reading the first few pages I came upon this quote which DOES describe me to a T!

"I am a reader, a flashlight-under-the-covers, carries-a-book-everywhere-I-go, don't-look-at-my-Amazon-bill reader. I choose purses based on whether I can cram a paperback into them, and my books are the first items I pack into a suitcase. I am the person whom family and friends call when they need a book recommendation or cannot remember who wrote Heidi. (It was Johanna Spyri.) 

My identity as a person is so entwined with my love of reading and books that I cannot separate the two. I am as much a composite of all the book characters I have loved as of the people I have met. I will never climb Mount Everest, but I have seen its terrifying majestic summit through the eyes of Jon Krakauer and Peak Marcello. Going to New York City for the first time, at forty, was like visiting an old friend I knew from E.L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale. I wanted to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, hide in the bathroom until it closed, and look for angels. I know from personal experience that readers lead richer lives, more lives, than those who don't read."(10-11)

I'll stop there but I could even go into the next paragraph which furthers her (and my) LOVE of reading! I was crushed when we visited this summer and never made it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art but in fairness I was there years ago as a teenager. I ask my children to take a book with them wherever we go-you never know when you might be stuck in the car or an elevator or in line and have just a few minutes to read a page or two. I can't wait to finish typing this post so I can read my school lunchtime book, Ungifted by Gordan Korman. What has you inspired?